I have made a boo boo somewhere. I have an IBM thinkpad 380xd and I was playing around with the gparted part of the puppy live cd and thought I had prepared the hd for a full installation of puppy, when I rebooted I got the ibm thinkpad splash screen and nothing else, have tried running various live cds and nothing except a blank screen appears. I have tried the supergparted and do get some commands and prompts but no results. I thought I had puppy installed and obviously I missed a step or did not partition properly. can someone point me in the right direction?

Can't say for sure, but sounds like you didn't install GRUB. As I recall, Puppy doesn't automatically install GRUB, but puts a suggested GRUB menu list entry in a temp file that you can use to edit the file while still booted up from the live CD.

So, you can't even boot from the CD? Were you able to boot from a CD before (must have been)? What is the order of your boot devices? What was on the hard drive before this all started? I guess, I'm just full of questions, but it looks like your ThinkPad can't find anything to boot, so my guess would be that the hard drive is first in the boot order, but there is no boot loader there so it stalls. Another possibility is there is no boot loader on the hard drive...AND the CD drive has failed. That's certainly a possibility with hardware as old as we're dealing with here.

Do you have a floppy drive you could try booting from? Might be able to get Puppy up and running that way.

it wont boot from the cd and did before, it had win 98 on it and the boot order was cd,floppy then hd. It has a floppy drive but I have no way to make a floppy . it must be something in the boot sector ,am looking for a win 98 cd but dont understand why I cant get the cds to boot, the cd drive is working because I can get supergparted to boot but I cant find any option on the cd to help me.have went through all of them.

What kind of CD's are you using? I mean, are the factory pressed, CD-R or CD-RW? How many different disks have you tried? All I've read about so far is supergparted and Puppy Linux, is there anything else?

Your supergparted disk seems to boot OK, and you can edit the HDD partition(s) with it, right? So your hardware is working. Must be a difference in the disks themselves. Have you been able to boot anything other than gparted recently?

The way a computer boots (with the boot order you mention), is it will look for boot info on the first device (CD disk), if it finds none it moves on to the next device, and so on down the list. So, a corrupt boot sector on the hard drive cannot prevent boot from a CD if the CD drive is ahead of the hard drive in the boot order. You could even physically remove the HDD from the machine, and still boot from CD's. That's one of the main features of Puppy, being able to use the computer when there is no hard drive.

well puppy is not booting and I have tried several versions, I see what you saying and it makes sense to me. not sure what the problem is, I did a good slow burn on the cd when I made it and it booted before I played with the partitions, I have partitioned before in pclinuxos so have an idea of how to do it. very frustrating this is

I have always had trouble getting CD-RW disks to boot with these older drives. Once in a while they will, but usually not. CD-R is somewhat better but still not 100% reliable, while factory pressed disks will usually work OK.

Often, with these old machines, I have to remove the hard drive and attach it to a newer computer (laptop or desktop) and install my OS there, then transfer the drive back into the old laptop. A frugal Puppy install work especially well this way.